Read also: Sprint and T-Mobile merger
In an interview, Son, who is also the chairman of Sprint, said that a merger with T-Mobile, the fourth-largest mobile carrier in the U.S will give him enough resources to compete with AT&T and Verizon Communications Inc. Together, AT&T and Verizon has the highest share of users and profit in the US, and as Son puts it, they don't have any "real competition".
In preparation for the price war, the billionaire said that he is willing to forego profit temporarily to gain a larger market share. This strategy was used by Softbank in Japan when it started creating the country's largest mobile network provider. Son used "White Plan" a strategy which gave SoftBank users free calls to each other and this convinced a lot of people to switch to SoftBank.
"We need a certain scale, but once we have enough scale to have a level fight, OK," Son said during the interview with PBS' Charlie Rose, as quoted by Bloomberg Businessweek. "It's a three-heavyweight fight. If I can have a real fight, I go in more massive price war, a technology war."
Son also revealed his plans to improve the network's infrastructure to give their subscribers faster connection speeds. He also said his arguments to support wireless broadband instead of cable connections.
"The mobile Internet, the Internet highway, is the most important infrastructure for the 21st century," Son said in the interview, as reported by Bloomberg Businessweek.
To promote SoftBank to the subscribers, Son tapped actors like Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, and Cameron Diaz to star in their ads. This move caused a 15 percent growth in market share and by February, Softbank has 25 percent of the market share and a total of 35 million subscribers.
